ABSTRACT

The latter part of the sixteenth century saw the development of a new kind of university graduate. There had been an increasing tendency amongst the upper classes to send their sons to university, creating a new ambience in which future men of letters of lower social origins could gain tastes and aspirations above their means: 1 'My gentry', as a character puts it in Marlowe's Edward II , 'I fetched from Oxford' . At the same time changing social and economic patterns denied such men the traditional careers through the accustomed channels of patronage and preferment.2 The Reformation had closed off many ecclesiastical destinations, and inflation reduced the value of incomes dependent on rents, which together with the gradual concentration of the nobility in London, in part a Tudor policy, led to a diminution of provincial households .